The Place To Talk TechComm

Adobe kicked off the recent Society for Technical Communication Summit (#STC13) Conference in Atlanta with a special half day session of thought leaders called “Adobe Day” (#AdobeDay.) The demo free sessions included individual presentations on specific themes around content, strategy, and an intriguing journey from past to future with one of our key products. The read more…

Here is why we are conducting a short survey to listen to YOU! At Adobe, we always strive to empower you with best-in-class tools for your technical communication needs. But the process leading to the development of your favorite Adobe Tech Comm tools and the marketing communication for these tools has always been a two-way read more…

Ellis Pratt of Cherryleaf in the UK made a very compelling presentation on the Changing Nature of Content in a recent webinar with Adobe. There is a webinar recording, and a detailed white paper (authored by Pratt) which you can download on this subject. NOTE: both of the links in the previous sentence will take read more…

Tables are relatively simple to create with Word, but compared to FrameMaker tables they would not be classified as “sturdy.” For years tables have been one of the strongest features in FrameMaker, in large part due to the degree that customers have “stretched the envelope” with complex, high page count projects that required tables with read more…

FrameMaker 11 has a long history of creating multiple versions of documents or projects to address different audiences, and similar but slightly different product lines. For at least two decades, FrameMaker users have been able to use conditional text control to issue different, custom versions of documents from a single set of “base” source documents. read more…

Amongst the many compelling reasons for upgrading from FrameMaker 7.x to FrameMaker 11, real “out-of-the-box” DITA support would surely be near the top of the list. Although FrameMaker 7.x was a competent and potent structured editor in its day, it was developed before most major milestones in DITA development and approval were achieved. A timeline read more…

FrameMaker 11’s structured editing features and XML support have come a long way from the model introduced ten years ago with FrameMaker 7.0. That earlier release of FrameMaker combined two earlier separate products (Regular FrameMaker and FrameMaker+SGML), granting customers a “two-for-one” authoring solution; every copy of FrameMaker 7.x could produce either traditional unstructured documents, or read more…

Book building capabilities for managing multiple project assets (chapters, document content) were one of the prime drivers for many users moving to FrameMaker 7.x ten years ago. Ironically, the powers associated with this feature have increased exponentially with recent releases. For anyone who has to manage multiple chapters in various stages of approval, enhanced hierarchical read more…

Many of us have heard about publishing from FrameMaker 11 to HTML5 “via RoboHelp 10″ in Tech Comm Suite 4.0. But just how much work does this involve, anyway? Surprisingly, not very much. Although it is relatively easy to either create or modify your own RoboHelp project, Adobe thoughtfully planted a built-in “Default” RoboHelp project read more…

Versions of FrameMaker after FrameMaker 7.2 introduced two potent features that could be reason alone to upgrade to FrameMaker 11: (a) track changes and (b) ability to import PDF review comments and annotations “in place” in the source FrameMaker document. Both of the features streamline the edit and review process substantially. Sample documents used for read more…